HomeFirst ceremony puts face to 33 Santa Clara County.homeless deaths

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Thirty three candles, one for each homeless person who died on the streets of Santa Clara County during the past year, flicker on a table at HomeFirst's Boccardo Reception Center Wednesday morning, Dec. 10, 2014, during a memorial ceremony in San Jose, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

Thirty three candles, one for each homeless person who died on the streets--or in the shelters--of Santa Clara County in the past year, flicker on a table at HomeFirst's Boccardo Reception Center Wednesday morning, Dec. 10, 2014, during a memorial ceremony in San Jose, Calif. The event was led by Jenny Niklaus, outgoing CEO at HomeFirst. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

SAN JOSE — It might not be entirely accurate to say they are forgotten because they were barely remembered in the first place.

They took their final breath during the last year on local streets, in the encampments that are tucked away throughout Santa Clara County or in temporary shelters. They were the sort of people that society often treats as invisible — or at least cause many to avert their eyes when they are noticed.

But Wednesday morning, 33 names were spoken aloud at a solemn ceremony at HomeFirst’s Boccardo Reception Center, giving each person a small measure of dignity, respect and closure. Although they may have not been well-known as individuals, they collectively were memorialized as representatives of America’s most vulnerable.

None of them had a place to call home.

“We often forget about the true cost of homelessness, and that includes people dying,” said Jenny Niklaus, the CEO of HomeFirst. “A lot of these people had no one. No one claimed their bodies. And if we don’t remember them, it’s like they never existed, that they don’t matter. Well, we should remember them because they do matter.”

The names of 28 men and five women slowly were read. Their average age was 56. Causes of death were not listed. But living on the streets was, at the very least, a contributing factor for all of them. Candles, placed in the shape of a heart, flickered for each one.

The 75 or so people who had gathered at the shelter for the annual memorial are on the front lines of the challenging fight to end homelessness in the county. Members of the Valley Homeless Healthcare Program, who treat about 7,000 patients each year, whispered to one another as they examined the names in the program.

Some they knew would be on the list. But others were a surprise.

“You don’t see someone for a long time and you just hope that they’re housed,” said Mercy Egbujor, a nurse practitioner. “And then you see their name is here and think, ‘That’s why we haven’t seen him.’ “

Her eyes settled on one name.

“I hadn’t seen Daniel Moore in awhile,” Egbujor said softly.

He died just over a year ago.

Another name stood out for Janet Kohl, an assistant nurse manager. Scotty Davis was 55.

“I always used to tell Scotty that he was better than what was controlling his life,” Kohl said. “He was such a sincere, compassionate person who was so hard on himself. I suspected that something had happened to him because I hadn’t seen him. But I didn’t know for sure until today.”

Valerie “Bunny” Good, 73, who died on April 24, had been on the Palo Alto streets for 32 years. She was the oldest person remembered.

“The police told us that they never had a report involving her,” said Chris Richardson, the director of program operations for Downtown Streets Team. “She was a fixture in Palo Alto.”

Dr. Sara Doorley, the medical director of the Valley Homeless Healthcare Program, told the mourners that the average age of death for a homeless person is just 47 — about three decades less than the general population.

“You have to go back to 1900 to see that kind of life-expectancy for Americans,” Doorley said. “Being homeless is incredibly difficult physically, emotionally and mentally.”

It’s also become incredibly common in Silicon Valley. There are nearly 7,600 homeless in the county — the nation’s seventh-largest total — according to this year’s Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. The county also has the country’s highest percentage of “unsheltered” homeless — 75 percent. Those are the people in the creek beds and huddled in doorways, who are the most susceptible to die of sudden illness or disease because they constantly are exposed to the elements.

The plight of local homeless became the subject of international press coverage last week when the city began the painful process of closing “the Jungle,” the infamous encampment along Coyote Creek where between 200 to 300 people lived.

This ceremony, which has been overseen by HomeFirst since 1999, is intended to put faces on a largely anonymous problem. During that time, 793 homeless have been remembered. The silver lining is that the annual toll has been trending downward in recent years — dropping from a high of 81 in 2008.

But people dying outdoors still happens with tragic regularity. Two more homeless are believed to have died since the mid-November cutoff to be part of this year’s ceremony. One of them lived at the Jungle.

“We look forward to the day when HomeFirst staff calls the coroner’s office and they say, ‘We don’t have any names for you this year,’ ” said Niklaus, who is leaving the nonprofit this month after six years at the helm.

This, however, wasn’t that day.

After the ceremony, Grace Hilliard, 59, asked to see a program. Hilliard was among those evicted from the Jungle last week and has been staying at the shelter with her beloved companion dog, “Little Houdini.”

She recognized five names.

“I didn’t know they were dead,” she said, brushing tears from her eyes.

In the 1980s, Pickens switched from drilling for oil to plumbing for riches on Wall Street. He led bids to take over big oil companies including Gulf, Phillips and Unocal, castigating their executives as looking out only for themselves while ignoring the shareholders.